In the greater Los Angeles, she reports, there are 2200 screens (and only 5% of them show arthouse films, American or Foreign), essentially located in West Hollywood, neglecting East LA completely. San Fransisco, Portland, Boston, Austin are supposedly more cinephile-friendly than the WORLD'S CAPITAL OF MOVIES itself...

The guys pretend that it is too expensive to release a film theatrically (cost of advertising), and that it's not worth it to invest in brick-n-mortar arthouses (again too expensive)... Well, the USA is not only the richest nation on Earth, but Hollywood also happens to be the movie industry that makes the most money in the world. So how exactly can you complain about the cost of cinema exhibition? Think about all the countries that do not enjoy the kind of wealth, money flow, captive moviegoing audience, widest exhibition infrastructure... Yeah, they still commit to indie and foreign films more than the USA does! (See: Shut-in "Cinephiles" (USA) 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13) How hard could it be?

I tell you what... *IF* the costs are really unbearable because cinephiles in LA are (way) below the sufficient critical mass, nothing stops you from being a bit ingenious and ressourceful, organise yourself online, create a network of "indie distribution" outside of the official channels of information. Today being visible and actively supported on social media is much more important and efficient than to pay for TV ads that nobody watch... (By the way, TV ads for movies is forbidden by law in France, to avoid the richest studios from cluttering the air time while leaving out the small distributors who can't afford it, and take a look at it yourself... IT WORKS FINE!!! In fact, challenging cinema is DOING BETTER than in the USA. Learn from it!)

It doesn't cost ANYHTING to spread the word of mouth/mouse within a motivated/deprived community of cinephiles desperately waiting for films to come out on USA screens. Rent screens in multiplex and rendez-vous a flash mob every week to watch an undistributed film together. And grow from there. The demand is anemic... but if you never start to build a certain sophisticated culture, to educate the general taste, to offer alternatives... it will never happen spontaneously. Because people are lazy, and it's too easy and complacent to fall back on comfort movies and effortless entertainment which is vastly abundant in Hollywood especially.

"It’s a combination of wanting a change personally and of feeling like I’ve hit a wall in my development that I don’t know how to break through. The tyranny of narrative is beginning to frustrate me, or at least narrative as we’re currently defining it. I’m convinced there’s a new grammar out there somewhere. But that could just be my form of theism. [..] If I’m going to solve this issue, it means annihilating everything that came before and starting from scratch. That means I have to go away, and I don’t know how long it’s going to take. And I also know you can’t force it. I love and respect filmmaking too much to continue to do it while feeling I’m running in place. That’s not a good feeling. [..]
I remember describing making movies as a form of seduction and that people should look at it as though they’re being approached at a bar. My whole thing is, when somebody comes up to you at a bar, what behavior is appealing to you? And there are certain things that I’m not willing to do to get a reaction. [..]
It’s not pandering so much as being obvious. Do you want to hang out with someone who has the most obvious reaction to everything that happens? That’sboring! And when I see a movie that’s doing the obvious thing all the time, it’s frustrating. [..]
The thing I also see a lot of is multiple endings—I feel like movies end like five times now! I remember being very conscious of the Lord of the Rings movies having a lot of endings. But I wonder if the audience has come to expect them. Music has become another of the most abused aspects of filmmaking. I’m mystified by the direction scores have taken in the last ten years. It’s wall-to-wall—it’s the movie equivalent of the vuvuzelas from the last World Cup! I don’t understand it at all. For me, it’s ideal when you can get the music to do something that everything else isn’t doing. [..]
The worst development in filmmaking—particularly in the last five years—is how badly directors are treated. It’s become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide they can fart in the kitchen, to put it bluntly. It’s not just studios—it’s anyone who is ­financing a film. I guess I don’t understand the assumption that the director is presumptively wrong about what the audience wants or needs when they are the first audience, in a way. And probably got into making movies ­because of being in that audience.
[..] I remember during previews how upset the audience was by the Jude Law character [in Contagion]. The fact that he created a sort of mixed reaction was viewed as a flaw in the filmmaking. Not, “Oh, that’s interesting, I’m not sure if this guy is an asshole or a hero.” People were really annoyed by that. And I thought, Wow, so ambiguity is not on the table anymore. They were angry."

On watching movies in theatres :

"It’s strange because you’d think there would be a lot of good theaters in Manhattan, but there aren’t. There are a couple, but in general it’s not fun to go out to movies here."

On the rebooting of the "American indie" film scene, like at the time of Sex, Lies and Videotapes :

"It would be hard because movies cost so much to market. I’m encouraged by Video on Demand, which is a very promising distribution method. But it’s much harder for filmmakers now. You’re sort of expected to emerge full-blown. That’s rare. Some people do, but I didn’t. Like I said, you can’t make five films in a row that nobody sees. You’d be in movie jail. I feel really lucky that I got to make the mistakes I made and still get to do Out of Sight."

On Candelabra being funded by TV (HBO) and not released theatrically in the USA (it will be released theatrically in Europe though!) :

"[..] After Warner Bros. put it in turnaround, we showed it to every studio in town. No one wanted it, even though we only needed $5 million. [..] But HBO was immediately into it, and the experience was great from beginning to end. [..]
It’s true that when I was growing up, there was a sort of division: Respect was accorded to people who made great movies and to people who made movies that made a lot of money. And that division just doesn’t exist anymore: Now it’s just the people who make a lot of money. I think there are many reasons for that. Some of them are cultural. I’ve said before, I think that the audience for the kinds of movies I grew up liking has migrated to television. The format really allows for the narrow and deep approach that I like, and a lot of people … Well, the point is, three and a half million people watching a show on cable is a success. That many people seeing a movie is not a success. I just don’t think movies matter as much anymore, culturally."

"Hello, I'm Leos Carax, director of foreign-language films. I've been making foreign-language films my whole life. Foreign-language films are made all over the world, of course, except in America. In America, they only make non-foreign-language films. Foreign-language films are very hard to make, obviously, because you have to invent a foreign language instead of using the usual language. But the truth is, cinema is a foreign language, a language created for those who need to travel to the other side of life. Good night." :D

26 février 2013

Mark Johnson hosts a look at the 2012 foreign language film nominees including a panel with the filmmakers. Includes "Amour," "War Witch," "Kon-Tiki," "No" and "A Royal Affair," with a special introduction by Ang Lee

17 février 2013

Filmmaker Peter Greenaway looks at cinema language, and his contention that cinema is dead or evolving. He shows many examples from his own avantgarde cinematographic imagery. Series: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities

"Nine Classic Paintings Revisited" is the second of two lectures presented by filmmaker Peter Greenaway as the 2010-2011 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at the Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley. Best known for such films as The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), The Cook, the Thief, his Wife & her Lover (1989), The Pillow Book (1996), The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003-2004), and Nightwatching (2007), Greenaway has worked more recently on numerous exhibitions and installations in Europe, from Venice's Palazzo Fortuny and Barcelona's Joan Miró Gallery to Rotterdam's Boymans van Beuningen Gallery and Paris' Louvre. Regularly nominated for the film festival competitions of Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, Greenaway has also published books, written opera librettos, and collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Borut Krzisnik, and David Lang, among others.

16 février 2013

"If the vaults were emptied, what would there be to look forward to? New movies, of course, which keep coming in at a dizzying rate—in quality as well as in quantity. But the grim history repeats itself at a pace to match, as it condemns some new work to an instant archival inaccessibility [..]“I Wish I Knew,” from one of our era’s best younger directors, Jia Zhangke, which features interviews with actresses from earlier times, and which still has never been released here, either theatrically or on DVD. The list goes on [..] but how could one get to see them here?Quantity matters desperately. [..]It’s one thing for there to be crucially edifying cinematheques the world over, starting in Paris, but it would be all the greater for their treasures to be liberated from the constraints of geography and massively, rapidly transferred to video and made available to viewers with access to computers. [..]The experience of seeing film prints projected on a screen in a movie theatre is indispensable [..] but the knowledge of the history of cinema shouldn’t be limited to those with access to the best repertory houses any more than a knowledge of art should be restricted to those who can travel to museums. [..]Scarcity and the sense of the artificial event, created by a new release, are part of the fetishizing process; the world of total instant access would make classics not news but simply there, as much a second nature as a first language. It’s a crucial step—oddly, one still hard for many to take, more than a century into the age of cinema—for making and loving movies on their own distinctive terms."

Richard Brody redeems himself (see previous episode) as a film critic who takes the responsibility of his job seriously.
Last Month he failed with an attempt to demonize Hollywood by pointing finger at an easy scapegoat, a harmless mediocre comedy (see: “Movie 43” and Hollywood Exceptionalism), instead of criticizing the Hollywood system for its most ubiquitous output, the dominant payload that effectively clutters the horizon for moviegoers trapped within its culturally numbing barriers. No, that's not how you prove to be critical of an industry when you fire on an ambulance, and celebrate the most damaging puritan and jingoist censorship.

Thanksfullly, this time, his article does what EVERY respectable critic should do when living and working in a cultural environment so severely limited by a self-indulgent, patriotic, lazy, supply-demand artificial market. He writes in no uncertain terms that availability of certain films (old or contemporary niche) is a SERIOUS ISSUE in the USA. He's not the kind to take action, but at the very least, the duty of any journalist is to relay the problem on every possible media and as often as possible... until the situation DOES CHANGE for the better. Mentioning it once a year, because it's a slow capsule batch week, is clearly not enough. And pushing hands-on activists to take action, pushing the audience for their choice to be respected, pushing the distributor to be less wusses, pushing exhibitors to take chances on regular basis. That's what film critics who care about the dire situation their fellow moviegoers are in would do.

When a country the size of the USA cannot even give a minimum of 100 screens to ALL MAJOR releases of world cinema (which includes Festival winners, BO hits in foreign markets, American indies), it is cause for SERIOUS INTROSPECTION on the part of any film lover, professionals or private citizens, and for FUNDAMENTAL STRUCTURAL CHANGES too. There are enough mediocre mainstream flicks that bomb at the BO, that even the most unsophisticated audience rejects, and waste valuable theatre screen space, to make room for a bare minimum of CULTURAL DIVERSTY in the USA, and save a lot of wasteful spending in crap flick production and marketing at the same time!

Relegating the thousands of foreign films made each year to a cut-throat ghetto of a couple hundred screens nationwide is not a fatality of the market. France is not the only country that offers a safe haven. When comparing to European markets, to South America or Asia... the USA distribution system is not simply conservative and protectionist, it is dead last, far behind, even for some pretty obscure films. the USA market could still be largely profit-driven, way ahead of any other country on Earth, and still make room for a vital minority of films to propose a DIVERSE CHOICE to American moviegoers (even if they still will pick the crap blockbuster in mass), a fringe niche a little bigger than 10 screens at the time in NYC and LA, systematically!
Think about it. Do you want the USA to be the lowest supporter of cultural diversity? Or do you want it to rank nearer to the top of the list? Well, deserving a respectable cultural level is something that requires efforts, every day of the year. Obviously, reviewing only what safe, coward Hollywood distributors bring to your feet every week is not going to be enough. Responsible film critics, who think of themselves more than assembly line marketing blurb writers, should stop insulting the taste of their readers and bring world gems to American theatres THROUGHOUT the land.